Guest of the Week (9/15/17)

The open-source community may be headed toward a major turning point, thanks to a security breach of epic scale.

When news broke this month that the personal credit records, including names, birthdates, Social Security Numbers and home addresses of 143 million people had been breached at the credit rating bureau Equifax Inc., there was outrage. As more details have emerged, reports have placed some of the blame on an open-source server framework called Apache Struts, although representatives from that project have issued their own statement questioning whether vulnerabilities in open-source software led to a hack of historic proportions.

Even if it’s found that a flaw in Apache Struts led to the massive breach, open source is not going away. In fact, major tech players, such as Microsoft and Amazon Web Services Inc., have recently put significant support behind open-source projects and startup investment in the field — reaching $3.5 billion between 2012 and 2015.

But there is still tension between a community of open-source developers who believe in the power of its collective, democratic model and companies who need to bring successful products to market that will realize a nice return for the bottom line.

“I don’t think that money is a primary motivating factor for most people in the [open-source] community,” said Christine Corbett Moran, Ph.D., NSF astronomy and astrophysics postdoctoral fellow at California Institute of Technology. “When you do something of value, money is the reward for that, and the only question is how to distribute that reward to the community.”

Moran paid a visit to theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio, and spoke with co-hosts John Furrier (@furrier) and Stu Miniman (@stu) during the Open Source Summit in Los Angeles, California. They discussed the power behind the open-source community, Moran’s own successful invention three years ago, corporate involvement in getting products to market, nation state attempts to stifle innovation and the challenge of training the next generation.